#178 Craig Wright claims to have mined (very) early blocks
- Wednesday, May 08 2019 @ 12:12 PM UTC
- Contributed by: PM
- Views: 502,180
Docket entry #178 had been published on Court Listener. This purports to answer the question of which public bitcoin addresses were controlled by Craig before 2013, and which were put into the alleged blind trust.
Here Craig claims that he "did not keep track of which Bitcoin blocks he mined", but nonetheless provides a redacted list of blocks that he claims to have mined. Unfortunately it seems that they were not redacted very well...
Using the Linux 'strings' command it is possible to extract the bitcoin addresses from the .pdf. These addresses received the coinbase outputs from mining blocks 26 through 70 (that were almost certainly mined by Satoshi himself). I'm making the assumption that these adresses are actually what the redacted text reveals; I can't prove it, but I can't think of any other reason these would be present in the document. Here they are in tabular form:
Block 26 was mined at 2009-01-10 06:54:10, and block 1 was mined at 2009-01-09 02:54:25.
None of the coinbase outputs in the blocks listed above have ever been spent. So if these were somehow transferred into a trust, it wasn't by sending them on the blockchain.
Looks like Craig has gone all-in with the court on this!
Update: WizSec have published their analysis showing that the first 70 blocks' coinbase addresses, when superimposed on the redacted text, line up exactly. So it looks like Craig is claiming the first 70 blocks as his. I'm not sure why only 26-70 were included as cleartext in the .pdf.